Basic Instinct

Grade-A pulp fiction. This erotically charged thriller about the search for an ice-pick murderer in San Francisco rivets attention through its sleek style, attractive cast doing and thinking kinky things, and story, which is as weirdly implausible as it is intensely visceral.

Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, though, Basic Instinct is mechanical and routine, a muddle of Hitchcockian red herrings and standard cop-thriller ballistics.

Basic Instinct has the action and gore of Verhoeven's Total Recall and the cool sheen of his equally bloody RoboCop. Verhoeven can deliver style in spades, but Eszterhas' jumble of confusing plot twists and conventional movie cliches proves fatal. [20 Mar 1992, p.29]

Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work quite effectively as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick--or rather, your ice pick).

This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels.

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world.

A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting.

Um filme sensacional, pena que o diretor tenha sido um babaca com a atriz. Ainda assim, gostei muito do filme, é bem interessante, intrigante e sexy.

Many explicite violent and sex scenes. Movie provokes in many ways. Story isnt that bad though.

This movie is extremely dirty in some scenes. Dirty enough in fact that the actors should be ashamed of being in them. The rest of the movie however has been underrated. It's not perfect. There's some tedium after a while ,and the sex scenes are nearly pornographic, but it's a well shot, well acted, and occasionally atmospheric cop thriller. Stone's Catherine Tramell is one of the most memorable and alluring femme fatales in cinematic history. She's the centerpiece of the movie and she supports it ably. It has a very good musical score, (Oscar nominated by the way), and overall it's somewhat memorable, but not good enough to be great. However, by today's R standards it's definitely not the completely pornographic sex fest critics made it out to be. Yes parts are pretty dirty, but it's mostly a crime mystery with a whole lot of plot, even if it could have been better.

This movie revolves around the mysterious murder of a celebrity and the attempt to discover the killer. The main suspect is Catherine Tramell, a fiction writer who wrote a similar crime in a book. But she is intelligent and manipulative, as well as a sexual predator, and will not hesitate to seduce Detective Nick Curran. The film features the memorable interpretations of Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, in the role that made her famous. The script is interesting but flawed and far from perfect. In fact, it has several plot holes, as the fact of completely ignoring DNA forensic evidence. The crime, moreover, loses importance throughout the film, as Tramell seduces Curran. In the end, nobody remembers the guy who died first. The hottest scenes are very choreographed, look spectacular and must have been very exciting by the time the film was released. Just remember the famous cross-legged scene, the most famous of the film and one of the rare occasions when an actress's **** appears in a frontal scene with nothing covering it. Stone looks well in her role, although it was the only film where she shone. Douglas makes a good cop but does not build any erotic chemistry with her. Its an erotic thriller with ambitions of a police film, whose content grazes pornography in a dangerous way. Much of the erotic scenes were not necessary and were even dispensable, if the film wanted to focus on crime. Stubbornly overrated due to that, it does not have the quality it advertises and promises.

I felt like I was watching a porno, with the same production value and cheap plot. The sex scenes were entirely over the top, and the movie was extremely predictable. Pretty much a waste of 2 hours.